'YOUNG, DUMB AND FULL OF CHRIST'

Faith plays a starring role in Rian Johnson's new Knives Out film, Wake Up Dead Man

- BY H. ALAN SCOTT

THE KNIVES OUT FRANCHISE HAS BECOME SOMETHING OF AN anomaly in modern cinema. In an era defined by superheroes and CGI-enhanced storytelling, director/writer Rian Johnson has created a franchise that is surprisingly familiar and old-fashioned, crafting a retro, Hitchcockian-inspired murder mystery that somehow still satisfies modern audiences' TikTok attention span. He's bound to do it again with the release of Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery.

For this third installment in the series, released exclusively on Netflix, Johnson and his trusted private investigator, Benoit Blanc, played by Daniel Craig, faced a unique challenge. After tackling the class struggle of an old-money family in the first Knives Out and the toxic culture of the tech elite in Glass Onion, where could Blanc go next? The answer lay in a theme arguably more historically explosive than any blockbuster action flick: religion.

“Can we make a movie that talks about faith as opposed to talking at it or finger-wagging or feeling didactic?” Johnson asks Newsweek in an interview alongside Craig and costars Josh O'Connor and Glenn Close. “But at the same time, that doesn’t pull any punches in terms of the conversation about both faith and religion and society. And can we do it? This is the bigger challenge in the context of a Benoit Blanc mystery, which is a big, fun, entertaining murder mystery that welcomes audiences into the big tent to have a good time with their families. And that seemed like an interesting challenge.”

The film finds Blanc in a small community in upstate New York investigating the murder of Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin). In one of Blanc’s most difficult “locked room” puzzles, Blanc finds himself teamed up with Father Jud Duplenticy (O’Connor)—a young priest caught between his vows and the truth—to navigate a group of church faithful whose spiritual devotion masks deadly secrets.